An Actor's Voice

Looking balefully up at that questionable title, I wonder whether it would be improved with the word 'actor' locked squarely in inverted commas. For there is nothing in my person as likely to bar me from future dabblings in drama as the tricky little matter of my voice. I didn't choose character acting - character acting chose me. For who doesn't initially set out in theatre to be one of those charmed, elfin creatures, strutting about being so pretty and admirable, courting such massive acclaim for the lightest possible touch? It is only natural that drama's initial draw should be its superficial side: if I stand on a stage and do things... people will like me. In spite of my impassioned vitriol for naturalism, and in spite of my tirelessly well-hewn arguments to its detriment, I have a sneaking suspicion that it amounts to little more than an insecure hate campaign against a fragment of my being that I'm unable to change. As with various other aspects of my person - my obsessive tendencies, my sexuality, my extremely antisocial character - I've come to accept that my blasted voice is as much a blessing as a curse. For instance, it happens to coincide with my very narrow body of interests - numerous adventures in the macabre, the brazenly theatrical, the grotesquely comedic and the therapeutic catharsis of a jolly good shout. Did my voice shape itself in response to these interests? Or perhaps go some way towards creating them? It's difficult to say. Let me instead burden you with an achingly comprehensive history of my voice - and how my distorted vocalisations have provided me with pleasure and pain in roughly equal measure.

I have no distinct memory of it first striking me that my voice was odd. It must have come from listening to myself in some recording or other. This is universally accepted as an uncomfortable experience, and, in one way, it confronts a cornerstone challenge in the acting trade: bridging the gulf between thought and action to make sure that as little as possible is lost in translation. It's for this very reason that the fruity, full-blooded and oh-so-very theatrical voices of the recent past are not to be dismissed as tasteless or contrived. As sustained acts of exaggeration - and hence projection - such vocal stylings provide a commendably simple solution to the problem by tackling it from the inside out: if the tongue cannot be sufficiently quickened to synchronise with the brain, then it is the tongue that must slow and richen in tone and be moulded by will into a more expressive instrument. The alternative is the tedious path to purity pursued by drama schools, where skill is progressively beaten into the student by successive turns of chastisement and penitence. This would seem to be the more effective and lasting option, but it demands a real commitment to change that can only be realistically facilitated in those forced conditions of sustained high pressure. For the rest of us then, the mere mortals, we're pretty much stuck with the voices we acquire by daily habit. I can't have been older than ten when I had vocal epiphany, and was most probably quite a bit younger.

And, oh - how I hated my voice. Wetness, principally - a sort of damp quality, horrible and sloppy, as though a deal too much saliva was sloshing about up there. Yet this quiddity seemed to wrap itself loosely about my tongue, as though absorbed into some burdensome phantom flannel, squashing flat my vowels and blurring my consonants into a single syrupy spatter. This blow was cushioned by other embarrassments. Infuriatingly deep even at that stage, long before the fabled voice breaking of pimply, pockmarked puberty. I often wonder whether my famed coughing fits as a baby - enormously loud and alarming whoopings, to the extent that concerned relatives feared I was choking to death - might have blown out my upper register for good, because the prevailing tonelessness of my voice was set in stone from infancy. I've certainly suffered with other diseases of the head holes, particularly those of the nasal strain. Now I accept that I will sound permanently as though my nose is blocked, regardless of the emptiness of my nasal passageways. And born of this thick linguistic soup was the most terrible scourge yet - a tone of world-weary smugness and orotund complacency that made me want to retch. It had crept into my speech while I was all unawares, and now resisted every effort at removal. The lugubrious voice of James Swanton was taking form - the bassoon recorded at half-speed. I couldn't have been less happy with it.

Thus was the start of my slow and steady descent into vocal paranoia. In one sense, it would make sense to say that my childhood died on the day that I first became aware of my voice. Crippling self-consciousness set in, and never again could I feel quite so liberated and carefree. Then again, in another, quite different sense, that would be talking a load of self-pitying bollocks, and although my voice did become a perennial hang-up, life remained very good indeed for the most part. Vocal stress seemed localised to brief incidents, which would all of a sudden flare up and just as quickly burn out again. I can't claim that I've ever been bullied in any serious way, but certain incidents have stayed with me. For instance, I once remember being asked 'what's wrong with your voice?'. Not an ounce of irony in it. Cold, brutal - head-on. Ouch. My retort was a short stunned silence, followed by a reflexive 'what's wrong with yours?' Far too cerebral for two children to appreciate, particularly when one is really rather hurt and the other is lacking in emotional intelligence and/or a braincell. There were other moments of this nature, always an abject humiliation, and in no small part responsible for my becoming so quiet. Gone were the days of playing the clever dick by raising my arm at school. Too terribly aware of being shot down with laughter to risk it. More ambiguous was my time at York Youth Theatre, where for a brief period I became infamous for saying 'oatmeal loaves' and 'jacket potatoes' in a tone of forced Yorkshire merriment. This was the curse of a play I appeared in called Allotments, which, among other things, afforded me the first really good review I'd ever had. The writer was Charles Hutchinson (legendary figure), the outlet was The Evening Press (now rechristened The Press):

The Allotments, a chance for children to play perky pensioners, unearths a comic talent of the future in James Swanton. Watch him blossom. It's all in the voice.

A double-edged sword then. Even though I knew I was crucifying myself to be court jester for a good while longer, it was truly heartening to ease an honest bit of laughter from an audience - in a fairly unforced way as well, something I've rarely managed since. For this is the inexplicable and maddening paradox at the centre of my bipolar vocal relationship. As much as it's held me back in drama, it's been a significant part of what little success I've had. Quite possibly the most significant part.

This is the redemptive side to my voice. As I hinted a little earlier, my style is more to carve the words in the air by force than permit them to form with an effortless grace. So correctly tamed - and suitably loud - I can imitate locutions vaguely suggestive of elegance, and at the very least, I can crush it into an overriding tone of pseudo-classical superiority and fusty English gentility. Cleon in Pericles belonged to this school, as did Pringle in Funeral Games and (in high camp form) Coupler in The Relapse. One of Orson Welles's outstanding truisms on the art of acting was of character as a basic subtraction. If you're playing a merry old soul, you drop your angst. If you're playing a drunk, you drop your inhibitions. If you're playing a rent-boy, you drop your trousers. And so forth. This makes sense to me, but I've always found it to be incompatible with my voice's idiosyncratic grasp of character. As far as I can gather, there's always some consistent and unchanging vocal characteristic a-lurking in the background, some base aspect of 'James Swanton' that refuses to go away, but it is to this canvas that I add my characterisation layer by layer. It's like painting at times - only more airy, more psychic - more loaded with pretentious adjectives! I sense the presence of different channels, often two or three overlapping simultaneously, through which I can project my voice to affect the necessary distortions. More rasp, I find myself thinking, and a touch sharper - now a purring and a key change on that word. The bassoon occasionally aspires to the post of satanic pipe organ. It's a sort of warping process, dictated by sensation, and one that has tested the strength of my voice to my satisfaction. It takes a hell of a lot for me to lose it, and thanks to the large amount of ghouls I've wound up playing (characters hardly renowned for the beauty of their speech), even this needn't be a problem. I'm also pleased to be loud. This seems a trivial point, but I've seen too many perfectly decent performances trashed by inadequate projection over the years to not feel grateful for my naturally active diaphragm. There are also the freak-show accomplishments (an astonishingly underrated form of theatre, as anyone appreciative of Tod Browning's Freaks will know). I don't know of anyone who can drive their voice as preposterously deep as mine; when challenged, I can drop it to the point of unlistenable, harrowing, throat-scalping creepiness. I do a good line in screeching, and have finally located the pocket in my throat that permits me to do this with minimal shredding of flesh. Little things afford me an inordinate amount of amusement. After years of imitating Basil Rathbone's immortal delivery of the line, in reference to the Monster's resurrection in 1939's Son of Frankenstein, 'Or am I supposed to have wh-ipped one up? As a housewife - wh-ips up an omelette?' - yes, I too have managed to hasten my wh-s to breaking point... I babble.

To begin with though, self-consciousness prevailed. I would affect voices by instinct, and in my really, really early efforts at plays, these became organic presences: essentially shapeless, and shifting from line to line as the fancy took me. I dimly recall playing a king in a nativity play, and being absolutely adamant that a line beginning 'we have followed the stars...' (I think) had to be delivered in an elevated, vague and stereotypically mystical fashion, where my voice would rise in pitch and then drift off into silence. Weird to remember that. Sort of pathetic too. And evidently cornerstone to my well-being for a little while that I did indeed manage to get the line out in that way. I was particularly pleased with my Ogre in Puss in Boots, who ranted and raved in the style of Fredric March in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I even stumbled over words and let sibilance go to blazes as though I was fitted with a set of March's toothsome Hyde dentures (I was wearing a brace at that point in time, which impacted not a fig on my pronunciation, but did lend my grin a pleasingly metallic sheen). My Duncan in Macbeth was, shamefully enough, an extended impression of Boris Karloff in the 1963 version of The Raven, in which his glorified sing-song acting voice is in high gear and summoned up an air of artificial cheer that I thought suited to the war-weary, soon-to-be-murdered Scottish royal. There's a sort of magpie mentality at work here - cherry-picking from a hoard of scanty, fragmented memories instead of aiming at a sobering and objective assessment of character. Of course, this isn't always desirable (aim for a nuanced and compassionate panto villain and you'll be laughed off the stage), and, in some ways, this is perhaps a commentary on the sort of scripts I was dealing with at this time. They were likable enough, and perfectly serviceable, but never the stuff of great writing and didn't involve an ounce of sincere emotion. When I finally was confronted with great writing in Macbeth, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to deal with it, and was quickly resorting to my magpie tendencies again.

As I've discussed elsewhere, the opportunity to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol was a wee bit of an epoch. On a vocal plane, it was an object lesson in creating character. I had the entirety of the summer to brood on how I might construct the voice. It was an uphill struggle to escape from my recent past in the land of the magpies, but one that was eminently useful. I still looked to the actors of the past as a first inspiration, but in an altogether more committed and comprehensive fashion. No point in going at this thievery business half-cock, after all. I did my research and I did it thoroughly. I discovered that Basil Rathbone had played Scrooge on radio, and tested his locutions to see if they would fit. They didn't. Likewise, I discovered that Laurence Olivier had played the part for an audio book. I had a listen, instantly realised how dreadful he was at it, and started looking elsewhere. I had been greatly inspired by David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, and looked to both Mr Sowerberry and the Fagin of Alec Guinness as possible Dickensian source material. No go. Karloff reared his head again, as did Vincent Price, Ernest Thesiger (so witty and memorable in The Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein) and Tony Jay, undisputed king of the villainous voice-over. I even checked the performances of Alistair Sim, Albert Finney and Michael Caine in their own variant versions of A Christmas Carol to make certain that I wouldn't copy anything by accident. Originality seems to have been the crux of my battle, so it seems odd that I saw a solution in cluttering my life with old-time actors. I guess that it wasn't so important that what I produced was original - no such thing as originality, after all, what with everything having been done at least once - merely that it was original to me, and some sort of positive development in my limited powers as an actor. I don't remember whether this epic search bore fruit or not, for all of a sudden, the voice sprung from my lips and I instantly knew that it was right for Ebenezer. With rehearsal, it matured into everything I'd been looking for: thin, reedy, begrudging, venomous, fawning and even nasal (by my standards). It's a voice that survives today in my endeavours at The York Dungeon, where Lord Chief Justice Judge Venables Vernon Harcourt the Fifth spews out his proclamations of absolute doom in the same idiolect that once berated Bob Cratchit, fizzled in fear in the graveyard and broke out in ecstatic bellows on Christmas morning. I still believe Scrooge to be the best thing I've ever done. A lot of this is likely down to the time that it came into my life, which invested it with an aura of untold responsibility and personally-felt magnificence. But even allowing for this optimistic gloss, I can't ignore the fact that the production set me on a path of vocal adventuring that has stood me in good stead ever since.

From that time on, I started to delve deeper and deeper into vocal 'creations' - new voices that required practice to hone, but were all the more satisfying for the effort. Just after A Christmas Carol, clearly buoyed up with hubris after my virgin vocal success, I completely ruined the character of Roy in Neville's Island with a heavy lisp and thoroughly goonish delivery, partly based on a reverend I had quietly admired and mocked. More satisfying was The Elephant Man, which was unnaturally high (for me; probably slightly over the normal level for everyone else), querulous; prying and priggish on occasion, and fragile from start to finish. Return to the Forbidden Planet gave me the chance to tip my hat to every horror actor in the book, and I at last settled on a complimentary zig-zag between Tod Slaughter, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, with a little Kesley Grammar and David Leonard (my all-time theatrical hero) hurled in for good measure. Whether or not this was evident in the performance is almost irrelevant. We never sound precisely as we imagine when we speak in life (though to bridge this gap between conception and result as elegantly as possible should be every actor's goal), but some variation of this happy creation will at least get out there.

I think that the zenith of all this was Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was an important project to me for many reasons. I was playing three characters: Goldstein (shadowy, possibly non-existent leader of the rebel movement), Syme (obsessive creator of Newspeak and general nasty) and a Eurasian Prisoner (who dies by firing squad... and says nothing whatsoever). It was to be performed in the main house auditorium of York Theatre Royal, a beautiful venue normally restricted solely to the professional classes. It has also been some eight months since I'd done a proper play, so I was hungry for a return. Goldstein and Syme were both a joy to devise voices for though. The fun in Goldstein was that the voice would be pre-recorded. Although it's a dreadful stress and panic knowing that you have only really one shot at getting a character 'right', this matures into a wonderful relief when the performances finally roll around. This was a lesson that I'd learned on Return to the Forbidden Planet, where my initial vomitings at my projected intonation of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' quickly prospered into delight that I wouldn't have to reproduce it live. It precursed my first entrance, and thus had the effect of filling my head with the right voice and quality of mania in a fashion devoid of the pitfalls of method acting. It wasn't a perfect performance (far from it; you can quite clearly see me reading the script in sections I was told would be edited out!), but at least it was in the can, and the relief was considerable:



Although the adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four from which the company worked was questionable in some respects (having originally been written for a cast of four), the Orwell novel is a masterpiece of sprawling, dystopian detail, and I could refer back to it whenever I wished for character pointers. The revelation for Goldstein was his likeness to a sheep. Instant character voice! Play him like a demented barnyard fluff-ball! Alright, it was a little more nuanced than that. The reasoning that Goldstein was likely a propaganda creation of Big Brother, deployed to whip the workers into a frenzy in the daily hate rallies, justified what could have easily descended into politically incorrect Jewish caricature. There were also two distinct sides to Goldstein on display in the production. First came the vitriolic screams processed through the telescreens. For this I watched a good few reels of Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies. It was a menacing thrill to hear my voice echoing through the great auditorium and know that it was out of my hands; in the spirit of multi-roling, I was among the workers shouting myself down with unrestrained vitriol. The second was a more subdued narration of a few pages of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (cor, big words). For this I listened to a range of audio books to perfect a calm, quiet indifference of tone. Even through a glaringly ostentatious character voice then, a modicum of subtlety and nuance is achievable. Syme was an ungainly mix of Alan Bennett (which meant a lot of 'A Chip in the Sugar') and Kenneth Williams (his intermittent slides into Cockney in the Carry On films rather than his more composed upper-class idiolect). It's another voice that lives on in Dungeon form, slightly modified for the character of William, the plague doctor's grovelling and waspish assistant. I had my doubts about Syme, and felt for sure after our short run that it had been an awkward failure. But then, quite by chance, I stumbled on two reviews online. I reckon that my being singled out is due to my perennial inability to seem young, and hence protruding like a sore thumb in the context of a youth theatre. The first came from York University's student publication, The Yorker:

The most notable performance however was from James Swanton playing Syme. This character was brought to life with a well-portrayed devotion alongside subtle eccentricities that sufficiently developed a broader picture of life in Oceania.

And, in a less celebratory vein, the BBC's backhanded compliment:

With some notable exceptions – James Swanton does a brilliant turn as Winston’s co-worker, Syme – the acting is, in general, unconvincing.

Very nice. But that's not to say that there haven't been some flat-out disasters. My efforts to impersonate Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire were horrendous, excruciating - among the worst things I've done in my life, a cardboard affair due to my inability to master a proper regional accent. I felt like doing as Robin Williams did in Mrs Doubtfire - intoning 'vell, I do voices' with unbridled intensity before launching into a marathon quick-cut montage of Walter Huston, Sean Connery and Ronald Reagan. A newly written play called Ghost's Reflection constitutes the absolute nadir of my theatrical endeavours - not because there was anything wrong with the play, which was a quirky, humorous and fast-paced account of a postman's darkly comic dissatisfaction with life, but my skin-crawling failure to simply SPEAK the words in my own voice. Everything was tremendously excruciating and strained. Oh, it was a train-wreck - and that's not self-deprecation either. The character was meant to be pitiful; not the performance, and not by extension the actor.

York Youth Theatre also afforded me the chance to dabble in another medium that's fascinated me for a good long time: radio. Quite out of the blue, I remember getting forwarded for the job with a bunch of other uncomprehending members. I wound up auditioning by phone, a new but surprisingly comfortable experience, for our very pleasant director Toby Swift. By some blessed stroke of luck, I got the part. I was going to be on BBC Radio 4. For a five-day week then (schooling be damned!), I was back-and-forth on the train to Manchester. The play was The Present, the writer was Jackie Pavlenko, and my character was Carl: the cynical and argumentative son of a put-upon woman cycling through mid-life crisis, bereavement and a crumbling love affair. Even when I do naturalism, it seems I'm cast as the bastard.

I regarded the BBC headquarters with the utmost fascination. I ate every day at the (in)famous BBC canteen, and discovered to my delight that they did a superlative line in cooked breakfasts. I got a tour of the magician's cabinet of the recording studio as well, including the echo chamber used to recereate the distinctive aural quality of an outdoors setting and a flight of stairs coated with contrasting layers of carpet to suit any number of dwellings. On one particularly surreal afternoon, I walked unsupervised down a corridor and happened to see the London Chamber Orchestra crushed into a studio and playing away with vigour. I also got to act alongside Jim Millea, a name that will mean little to most people, but is thrown into sharp, instant relief when it is remembered that joined the immortals as Neville: the endlessly incompetent pub landlord of Hollyoaks fame. For the uninitiated, Hollyoaks positively demands to be watched. It's by far the funniest thing on television in this day and age, sometimes intentionally, more often unintentionally, a sort of postmodern version of The Alchemist - a dark urban landscape populated with squalid, degrading and sinful characters who drum themselves into yet deeper cesspools of criminality, violence and sexual depravity. Anyway, Millea was great. Did the most convincing impression of a parrot I've heard in my life. Yes, that's right. A pet shop is the perfect venue for a mid-life crisis. All in all, a lovely experience. But when I listened to the broadcast, I found myself wincing a fair bit and leaving the room whenever I came back on. Make no mistake, it was 'JAMES SWANTON' (capitalised this time). It's a disquieting thought that the performance of mine that reached the largest number of people was rife with the natural tics and mannerisms that I despise so much - the same tics and mannerisms that stand in such firm opposition to my beliefs in the acting business. I have my suspicions that they're the reason I was cast in the first place. I regret nothing. I've listened to the CD since, and it's a tolerable effort - there are good points and there are bad points. The folks at the BBC never indicated that they were anything other than satisfied with my contribution, so full credit must go to them for their humbling professionalism.

One broadcast I didn't listen to was Jonathan Martin: The York Minster Incendiary. This was recorded at BBC Radio York for a production company known as Soundstage North. I had a number of small parts, amongst them one where I just coughed repeatedly, as though trapped in a burning cathedral. More importantly, the play offered a run-in with Berwick Kaler. This name will mean nothing to those not based in York. But to those bearing even a tangential connection to this Mecca of the Northern World, he bestrides the theatrical landscape as the almighty arch-dame: the undisputed king of British pantomime. Contrary to expectations, he was not wearing a frock when I strolled past him at the front doors. Rather, he was puffing on a fag and derisively claiming himself to be the doorman. A bit of a surly chap in person, but a true legend, so I didn't mind. He gave me a good deal of help with an accent I was doing, advice that was both pertinent and greatly appreciated. No other radio offers have been forthcoming, but these were both fascinating and rewarding experiences (paid too; I received no more and no less than two pounds for my Soundstage contribution!) and I look back on them fondly. Truly, this was a golden time - a time when solely my voice was required and seemed adequate for the task's demands.

Less prestigious than these professional engagements, but infinitely closer to my heart, is the long-running (getting on for five years now) Harry Potter spoof. This was the brainchild of my dear friend James Davies, who dashed out what was - to us at least - a mind-bogglingly witty few scenes that recklessly derided and pilloried the wonderful world of K. J. Railing. It's too laden with obscure in-jokes to make much sense to anyone other than us - an unholy, primordial soup of the alumni of Manor CE School, the productions that flourished there and (improbably in the first installment) The Sword in the Stone and A Christmas Carol. 'Chapter One: Hut on the Rock' is probably the finest insight into the kind of impenetrable weirdness that can only prosper with best friends. Watch out for Davies's flair for (kinda) understated metatheatrical flourishes in this first outing:



The series matured (regressed?) from that point on. James Davies took the roles of Harry, Hermione and McGonagall, whilst I played Hagrid, Ron (as a ginger sock puppet... no reason for this), Dumbledore (patterned on the senseless, nigh-incomprehensible wheezings of Richard Harris), Voldemort, Pince, Uncle Vernon, Snape and various others. Another idea that was knocking about from the early stages was to provide a narration in the style of the Harry Potter audio books. Happily enough, this gave me the chance to sling my feeble impression of Stephen Fry into the brew (in the video posted above, it doesn't even sound like his balls have dropped). Great fun, all in all, a little tiresome to edit together at times, but it gave me a restricted opportunity to practice the art of silly voices in the comfort of my own home. I think my favourite of the lot remains 'Chapter Five: The Dursley's House'. The writing was a team collaboration by this point, Mr Fry's voice had deepened to my satisfaction, and the twisted humour was stoked by our shared mockery of the fate of Bertha in Jane Eyre, the hilarious notion that Gordon Brown might soon be Prime Minister, and, most importantly of all, the Radcliffe-Griffiths team-up in Equus - a play that I'd just seen in the West End and been absolutely horrified by (for all the wrong reasons). Idiosyncrasy abounds:



We finally wrapped the series up last year with the recording of the epic song 'Dumbledore'. I have a lot of love for Les Miserables, and the idea that we might blow a respectful raspberry at its most powerful number, 'One Day More!', in the persona of various demented wizard caricatures, seemed too much fun for words. I had a whale of a time in thrusting together the obscene and pernicious lyrics, and even more fun lay in wait in our afternoon of recording, in which my bedroom gave way to a sea-change of caterwauling and diabolical screeches. There's not a correct note to found in the final recording (if you run across one, let me know, and I'll edit it out), and I've never failed to be deeply moved by the sheer quantity of blood that gushes from my ears in the final counterpoint:



This private war against my voice has been waging for so long now that you'd assume I'd have gotten over it. Not so. The latest vocally induced trauma came a mere six months ago, when I went merrily skipping through Cambridge to contribute to a society looking to record selected scenes from Shakespeare. It was a very small part - First Priest in Hamlet - and rehearsals for The Relapse had prevented me doing any meaningful sort of line preparation - not that there were that many of 'em to begin with. In retrospect though, these reminders of my task's humble nature were only to add to the humiliation of the ordeal to come. I should have seen it coming. I was soon pinned in a small room with assorted theatrical luminaries (by Cambridge standards, at any rate). I'd never seen actually seen any of them perform before, but knew two of them by reputation and would soon see a third act and develop a great respect for their ability. I was but a floundering fish, but in my stern dedication to my philosophy of constant utilisation, I was determined to do the best job I could. Well, we did a read-through. I got a note. Fair enough. Show me the path to improvement and I'll gladly follow, every time. But this was no simple note: 'Oh, James - could you make it less "Mr Voiceover Man" please?' Ah. Ah. Kneejerk reaction. 'OH, GOOD GOD...' I screamed internally, 'NOT THIS SITUATION AGAIN.' I tried to laugh it off. Feebly. It was no use. No way out. From that point on, I was dead inside. So it went on. On and on. Recording after recording after recording. And every time I provoked some snarky, biting, quite unintentionally soul-destroying response. The nightmare climaxed in my actually being led aside, as the others, to their credit, all retreated very politely to their own separate corners, making small talk to disguise their impression of quite how unforgivably bad I was. 'I'm sorry it's so terrible,' I remember saying. 'It's not terrible,' came the reply, which seemed to me near-certain evidence to the contrary, 'You have a great voice, it's just that...' Sometimes there are no words. The eventual conclusion was that I lengthened vowels unnecessarily, so I stumbled back into the recording process, throwing enunciation to the winds and garbling like a petulant steam-hammer to repent for my sins, finally escaping into the cooling nectar of the evening rain, feeling more dejected and miserable than I had for quite some time.

A number of elements conjoined here so precisely as to place me in a state bordering on torment. Having my pronunciation corrected by another actor (but then, that actor always corrects my pronunciation), which made me feel ignorant of how to speak or even read Shakespeare all over again. Projecting such a monstrously bad impression for people I'd only just met and still regarded as somewhat superhuman. The delivery of a promise that had been hovering over me since the audition, in which I'd been sternly instructed to be 'less villain-y' in my reading (whatever the hell that means). Perhaps most rattling was a throwaway comment from the director, which I suppose was meant as consolation: 'Don't let these ADC actors throw you off...' In other words, these people can act. And you can't. I must have been thought the soul of inexperience, and given my unforgivably shoddy performance, I can't blame anyone for getting that idea. Above and beyond it all was that atrocious and execrable voice of James Swanton - damp, unresponsive and ponderous - which was not only embarrassing me to an unprecedented degree, but inconveniencing, irritating and likely also embarrassing a group of people who I wished only to please. Oh, everything against me. Sweat trickling from every pore. Heart lodged in gullet. Shaking nervously. My God. I thought it would go on and on. Fortunately, it didn't, but the scars remained, and I opted to retreat behind my usual rut of protective masks for the remainder of the term. There's no way of proving it, but I believe this experience had a direct knock-on effect on my giving an unprecedentedly hammy performance as Coupler in The Relapse (even by my standards; but given this agenda, I feel no shame), before cutting out that loathsome voicebox entirely by appearing Silent Canonfire, in which my character's tongue being cut out rendered me a mute within a mute play.

I told a friend about the incident. They didn't say much except 'directors are idiots' - and as a prolific director themselves, I'm guessing that that's a general note and in no way a specific attack. It can't be denied that I was unforgivably, impossibly bad... but then I shouldn't have been cast at all on the basis of my equally mannered and uncontrolled audition. It's not the director's task to expunge inferiority from their midst by brute force. They should spot it at the outset and politely decline to get involved. Or else really take the time and effort to get the best from something that has a glimmer of potential, but remains in need of gentle provocation before anything worthy can be done with it. To cast someone and then beat them over the head with their own incompetence is, quite simply, unforgivable. Possibly the tension became a bit too much. The terrifying distinction with radio as opposed to theatre is that the ephemeral quality is gone. There's no lengthy time for development or gestation. One rehearsal, two at most - curtain up, light the lights - and into the can it goes. From this perspective, I can well understand the panic from the director's standpoint. But this carries us to wider problems surrounding the radio performer in general. How far can an actor go knowing they need never learn the lines? Or even scan them before the five minute mark? It's certainly an enviable skill to be able to get things 'right' at a stroke with a sight-reading. I'm a little more suspicious as to whether any of us were getting the best of the text within these stifling parameters. The name of the game was Shakespearean naturalism - which I assume relies on a protean familiarity with the particular texts, which I also assume none of us really possessed - and I failed outright. I'm just glad that I didn't get this same uncomfortable reception at the BBC. Now that would have been truly devastating.

By way of a happier postscript, I recorded the Porter's speech for a production of Macbeth located in the dingy, serpentine basements of the Cambridge English Faculty. This was nothing if not a positive experience. I'd done Macbeth once before, in that severely truncated, expressionistic version at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and had been disappointed to find the immortal Porter cut entirely. Quite by chance then, this play delivered on a dream that had lasted for a fair few years. The positivity was abundant. Yes! You can do it in an arbitrary character voice. Yes! We like that it's over-the-top - that'll be an interesting contrast with the prevalent naturalistic emphasis. Yes! Our recording equipment is only so-so, but our hearts are large and our appetite for play-making contagious! Actors are simple folk. Just pat them on the head and make them feel useful and they'll be pliable to your every whim. Happy performances tend, on the whole, to be good performances, so such an atmosphere is to be encouraged. Even if the sinewy grace and elevation of the Shakespearean nobleman will be forever beyond me, I can at least have a bit of hearty fun with trashing my way through the prose idiots. It gives me license to create my own rhythms in the text - and not fritter away the potential enjoyment of a performance by worrying about someone else's opinion on them.

It's undeniable that there's too much pretension surrounding Shakespeare nowadays -and interesting that Dickens, top candidate for England's second greatest writer in terms of volume and quality of output, has fostered little to none of it. Dickens has retained his connection with the common man. Shakespeare has too, but not to so great an extent. The swift and brutal termination of all that god-awful, wallowy romantic criticism of Shakespeare (usually any text in which that unwieldy term 'genius' is repeatedly abused) was a needed step, but the mind-boggling technical pedantry that was to follow, whilst a considerable boon to scholarship, has proved positively disastrous for severing the Bard from his audiences. In preparation for Richard III, we enjoyed the brief but overbearingly energetic services of a fellow who'd once worked for the National Theatre. An absolutely lovely man, but he did have a way of crushing the life out of me and the rest of the cast by forcing us to repeat a line over and over for five minute stretches, until such time as he felt we were grasping it properly. Only then had we accomplished... what? Self-loathing? Awareness of our own mediocrity? A belief that Shakespeare is forever impenetrable? There was a knock-on effect too. I was left in a state of mild panic ahead of Pericles, my second go-around on the Theatre Royal's main stage, where I'd been asked, in a rare, rare change of pace, to play a basically normal human being. Speaking Shakespeare in my natural voice? Inconceivable! These good-natured bully-boy tactics are all very well in a drama school. But ineffective and counter-productive as a one-off. And certainly a large part of my lack of confidence in approaching Shakespeare. I can like Shakespeare. I can admire him, wonder at him, delight in him, laugh with him, all the frenzied, appreciative gestures. Oh, you bet I can like him - with such focused, driven fixation. But love him? No. There'll always be that fine veneer of academically-charged suspicion. Funnily enough, I get on with Marlowe just fine. Probably because, Doctor Faustus aside, there's not such a devastating cult of searing, white-hot pretension hissing round about him. Dickens remains my idol among writers. Not to mention a more helpful route into learning the ins and outs of acting... But the marathon wrestling match between Shakespeare and Dickens must wait for another blog entry. And another writer who dares feel qualified to write on Shakespeare at all...

Many thanks for trawling through my copious and unrequested ramblings. The topic is at the forefront of my mind due to the sheer virtuoso range of character voices demanded by The York Dungeon. Eight characters, and each in need of a different form of bonkers vocalisation. The fact that some five weeks of constant shouting have caused my vocal facilities to realign means that such things have required a daily reimaging. More than this however, looms the upcoming challenge of Pickwick & Nickleby. All those voices, all clamouring to get out... It's enough to drive anyone crazy.